I kindly refer you to the presentation I did in AKSE 2003 by the title "Sômin as a Social Category in South Korea" (Word document). Of course I couldn't fit all the stuff in it, but it has most of my observations and thoughts around the topic.
In one sense "sômin" definitely refers to the petite bourgeoisie so that the small businesskeepers are "the essence" of the concept, people to which it most freely is applied to. In political parlance, OOP and GNP lump everything "below" the middle class as sômin, and DLP makes the distinction between the workers (nodongja) and sômin, which in that case is easy to see as the self-employed. (In their party programs they may talk of minjung, but that just doesn't connect when one needs votes.)
At February 22, 2005 10:12 AM, kotaji said...
Cheers Antti. I've actually been meaning to read your paper from the previous AKSE conference (2001), which is sitting on a shelf within reaching distance in the office where I work.
It strikes me that the use of hanja in Korean provides a richer range of possibilities when it comes to expressing these nuanced class-related concepts. In English we end up with these slightly awkward sounding combinations like 'ordinary people', while terms like 'the masses' or 'commoners' sound laughably old-fashioned or quaint. I wonder if the situation is the same in Finnish.
Of course we don't actually need these words any more in Britain because everyone is middle class now...
